Criminal minds - season 4

I'm glad I'm watching this on dvd so I didn't have to wait months to see who got killed. I never believed it could be Hotch, Rossi or Derek, but what about JJ? What if they were planning a change, a tragedy that would touch all of them? And what about Will? He's not even part of the team, and yet he's important. My fear of a moment was, of course, him because I had forgotten one person, the most likely, actually.
ep 1 - Mayhem - It was Hotchner's car, but he wasn't inside. He's hurt, but it's Kate the one badly injured, and now that it's personal he doesn't agree any more with his policy of "not intervene, because it's probably a trap".
Garcia knows that Rossi and Reid are safe, but doesn't know about the others. First, she calls Derek. Emily calls her, then contacts go down before she can call JJ. Finally they all know. Derek makes a speech "you don't leave a man behind" not caring about the fact that it was him and his team who gave the order... they are good words only when it doesn't touch you, right? So because of them some secret service guys get killed, but we don't know them, they don't even have a name, so it shouldn't matter, that's the deal right? Yeah, I get it, but I don't like it. What he did was wrong.
At the end Derek plays hero driving the bomb far away so it won't kill anyone. Garcia is worried-sick for him. "Garcia, you're my God-given solace" :-) and "woman, you promise me one thing. Whatever happens, don't you ever stop talking to me" :-) You're good, Derek, deep down you're a really good one, huh?
Kate dies. They broke all procedures, causing the deaths of the ss guys and she died anyway. :-/
At least Cooper is alive :-)
Hotch was badly hurt at his ears, so he can't fly, and Derek wants to drive him, and they talk and Hotch tells him he didn't work with the team but for himself. "Quantico requested you transfer to run the New York office" but Hotch didn't give any recommendation. "your actions, as incredibly brave as they were, were still the actions of an agent who doesn't truly trust anyone" also "my life matters to me and I have and always will entrust you with it. Would you do the same for me?" but Morgan doesn't answer.
 - Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime. Ernest Hemingway
ep 2 - The angel maker - Reid has a new haircut :-) Hotch still has trouble with his ears, but he flies anyway. Needless to say there are loud noises that hurt him, even a gunshot next to him, so at the end he doesn't fly with them, he drives the 7hours journey back to Quantico.
It's funny how Emily looks at Reid and touches his face after he explained how he cracked the code :lol: yes, it was a bit too much for a human :lol:
A woman was raped and killed, apparently by a known serial killer executed exactly one year ago.
This copycat is a fan of the dead serial killer, because there are people like that.
Garcia: "a murdering paedophile paints clowns and people hang them on their walls. It's creepy on so many levels, I mean, clowns.."
Emily: "Coulrophobia. Abnormal fear of clowns"
Garcia: "oh no there is nothing abnormal about it. When I was 12 a hobo clown groped my breasts at a birthday party and made this old-timey honking noise when he did it. Apparently making it funny makes it okay" Oh God, that is so disturbing and sick. I guess there was no adult watching them, seeing the scene.
Anyway, our dead bastard autographed a lot of things, from photos to panties and made origami. He had not just fans, but groupies as well: women in love with him, as sick as it may sound.
 - We all die. The goal isn't to live forever. The goal is to create something that will. Chuck Palahniuk
 - Wendell Berry said: the past is our definition. We may strive, with good reason, to escape it or to escape what is bad in it, but we will escape it only by adding something better to it.
ep 3 - Minimal loss - Benjamin Cyrus (Luke Perry) is the church leader of a isolated community. Emily and Reid go there to interview the children, be sure they're not abused, after they received a phone call for help.
They are devoted to him, and this 15 years old girl is married to him. If they are so close to God, why are they so full of guns and rifles? Nobody ever asking that?
Anyway, while they're there the place is assaulted by cops shooting. In Colorado, they are " a fringe religious group known as the Separatarian Sect". The team learns about the situation on the news, and go there to save them. Wow, Hotch saying to the Attorney General of that state: "I'm Aaron Hotchner unit chief. I'm the guy who's going to tell the Attorney General of the United States whether to charge you with obstructing a federal investigation or negligent homocide" - "you can't talk to me like that" - "get off my crime scene!" :-D yeah Hotch, tell him, nobody can mess with Aaron Hotchner :lol: even when he's angry he talks like that :lol:
They work with Dan (Connor Trinneer) and his men. Tv news announces there is one Fbi agent inside, and Emily says it's her, and Cyrus beats her but knowing that they're listening, or at least strongly suspecting it, she says "I can take it", apparently to Cyrus but really to the team, a message for them not to rush in for her. Tough Emily! Hotch all worried for her and for Reid was touching. "if something happens to Prentiss or Reid, I don't... I don't know..." which is worth more than a thousand words somehow, at least coming from him.
At the end it's a success in a way, because most of the  people are safe, and so are Prentiss and Reid, but the girl Jesse is dead. Her mother had started it all calling 911 to save her daugheter but Jesse was so devoted to him that after seeing him dead she blows herself up.
 - To follow by faith alone is to follow blindly. Benjamin Franklin
 - Reason is not automatic. Those who deny it cannot be conquered by it. Ayn Rand
ep 4 - Paradise - Couples stop in a motel and are killed after being tortured. This is a psycho-type of episode, and the torturer is played by Wil Wheaton. They stop him before he could kill the last couple. I'm glad, I liked them. Sadly, we also see he's killed much more couples than they knew of. At the end Hotch is troubled "I was here. I talked to him and I didn't see it." Yeah, that surprised me too, but he's human, it can happen to him too. It was good for the story and the character and the show, because this way they are more real. Even Hotch the hero.
Hotch says "remind me to have her drug-tested" talking about Garcia :lol: I love him.
JJ puts headphones on her belly so the baby can listen to Beethoven...
 - Thomas Fuller wrote: a fool's paradise is a wise man's hell
 - Roman poet Phaedrus wrote: things are not always what they seem. The first appearance deceives many. The intelligencce of a few perceives what has been carefully hidden
ep 5 - Catching out - Morgan meets a pretty girl in the coffee shop, but is surprised when she calls him by name and he doesn't remember ever meeting her! Is it possible he forgot her name? She's very pretty.
"This has never happened to me before" - Reid:"it hasn't happened to me before either" - Emily:"well, it can't happen to you. You have an eidetic memory" (My bad memory works as badly with faces as with names or anything else) - Morgan:"and besides, you've only got one name to remember" ..ehm, what is he talking about? It's just a joke or is he talking about someone in particular? Maybe that blonde actress that kissed him?
It ends with JJ introducing them all to the pretty girl: Agent Jordan Todd, she'll be taking over while JJ will be on maternity leave, after seven years on counterterrorism.
Case: a guy goes home to home in different cities moving by train, killing the people inside and living in their houses for a while, and sniffing glue. Morgan and Rossi go talking to the homeless people, and Hotch removes the name Highway 99 Killer from the board. At last they find him and Hotch shoots him from the car.
 - Plenty sits still. Hunger is a wanderer. Zulu proverb
 - Beyond the east the sunrise, beyond the west the sea, and the east and west the wander-thirst that will not let me be. Gerald Gould
ep 6 - The instincts - A little kid, Michael, is kidnapped; the mother is detached, blames her husband.
Reid has nightmares, one on the jet, one inside Michael's parents house. I liked how the woman kept looking at him, kinda feeling sympathy for him, as if she liked him more, felt him more human and close because he had nightmares. You know, I understand that, I liked that scene with that woman very much, the actress did very good, very well shot, very effective.
Reid:"Freud's been discredited, but Jung still has his merits" :-) Morgan finds out that when Reid was four, a six years old boy was killed and he went to his funeral.
Reid: "Hotch, do you think it'd be possible to wait until tomorrow to return home?"
Hotch to Morgan: "Do you think you could find something to do in Vegas for the night?" and he could even keep a straight face while saying that :lol:
Reid gets permission to sleep on the couch in his mother's room, and she goes: "if anyone tries to keep him in here any longer, I'll scratch your eyes out" :lol: "it helps if they think you're crazy. They don't argue.":lol:
So Reid stops here with her, while JJ, Rossi, Morgan, Hotch and Emily eat chinese together: it always gets me to see Hotchner smiling or laughing, because I think of the character, not the actor. The actor smiled a lot in other roles, but Hotch is something else.
In the last scene, Reid dreams and in his dream he sees his dad with the dead kid.
Case: this mentally-ill woman, she had a baby but it was taken away from her, and now she abducts children seeing them as her own.
It was funny Emily's comment on the messy crime scene: "it's the crime scene investigators. They all want to play cop instead of just being scientists and they end up trampling on everything" :lol: what I thought of Csi: funny, sure, I liked it, but it doesn't make sense. In every other show you barely see the Csi people, but here they do everything: they do the interviews, they investigate, they follow the case from start to finish. No sense in that, there are no cops in Las Vegas?
 - Amos Bronson Alcott said: who speaks to the instincts speaks to the deepest in mankind, and finds the readiest response.
 - Bob Dylan once said: I think the truly natural things are dreams, which nature can't touch with decay
ep 7 - Memoriam - They are still in Vegas, it is the next morning. Emily's hangover makes her say she hates Vegas. They go but Reid wants to stay to investigate the Riley case, but back to his room he finds Morgan and Rossi and tells them he thinks his father did it. Mr Reid is in Vegas too, always been, and they go to see him at work, but Reid can't talk, at first he's too emotional. Then they meet him but Reid's still angry and half-accuses him. Garcia goes through his files: nothing bad or illecit, only everything about him :-)
Reid is so determined to nail his father for the murder of the boy, he just won't stop; they find out the truth with the help of his mother, and arrest the father of Riley, because he killed the bastard that killed his son.
Reid uncovers the whole truth; that Gary Michaels had approached Spencer too, to play chess, and his mother understood everything as soon as she saw the way Michaels looked at him: "a mother knows". She told Riley's father, he found him and killed him with a baseball bat, then Diana Reid saw the body so her husband burned her bloody clothes to protect her, but the burden was too much he couldn't take it.
"you could have come back" awww Reid, sounding like a baby "I was wrong about everything, I'm sorry" yes, you were, at least you admit it.
JJ goes into labour and they are all there for her  :-)  Her baby is so cute :-) Will of course is there too. JJ and him want Spencer and Garcia to be Henry's godfather and godmother. Sweet, he was touched.
I love that in this series there are some friendships and a lot of respect, but they don't stress us with useless love stories. I mean, there's Penelope and Kevin, and JJ and Will, but that's the point, just those two and it took some time, but not between the main characters. I'm glad about that. Unfortunately they so often have the tendency to turn every show into "the bold and the beautiful".
At last, can we spend a second for "how is it that I just went through 15 hours of labour and you look worse than I do?" (JJ to Reid) - Reid replies:"Don't be ridiculous. You look beautiful" How nice are they? I like how they kept their friendship.
P.S. Reid calls Yale his "safety school" :lol:
 - What was silent in the father speaks in the son, and often I found in the son the unveiled secret of the father. Friedrich Nietzsche
 - There is no refuge from memory and remorse in this world. The spirits of our foolish deeds haunt us, with or without repentance. Gilbert Parker
ep 8 - Masterpiece - Reid and Rossi are talking in front of a full class, and Reid makes a joke... embarassing. Prof Rothchild approaches him and tells them that he killed seven women but there is still time to save the next five, that they'll be dead in 9 hours. Kevin is there with Garcia :-) They rush to find them, a girl and her little students. Hotch wonders if he should send Reid to talk to him, but Rossi insists that what he wants, his game, so Rossi wants to conduct the interview himself, and gets pretty sensitive about it, like wondering if Hotch doesn't believe him intelligent enough. Come to think about it, when Rossi said "you think he's smarter than me?" he was referring to Reid or Rothchild? At first I thought he meant Reid, but that would make him sound a little like a child. Maybe he was referring to Rothchild, in that case no, he's not smarter than you, Rossi. In the end, the evil mastermind turns out to be just a man seeking revenge for his brother, a murderer that Rossi caught years ago. Rossi outsmarts him though, because Rothchild was too arrogant and too keen on his vengeance, so Rossi tricked him into a videotaped confession, after sending his team to free the prisoners, warning them of the probable trap Rothchild had prepared for them. This will make a good lesson, since Rossi teaches interrogation :-) He says so.
I don't like this agent Todd, here. JJ was much more sensitive and sweet. She's very pretty though.
 - Let us consider that we are all insane. It will explain us to each other. It will unriddle many riddles. Mark Twain 
 - Man must evolve for all human conflict a method which rejects revenge, aggression and retaliation. The foundation of such a method is love. Martin Luther King, Jr.
ep 9 - Pickup - This episode's psycho-bastard kills girls: he cuts them open and forces them to clean their own blood. Talking to the mother of a victim, Agent Todd says she lost her sister to induce her to cooperate, but Hotch knows she's an only child and is angry at her: "I don't know how you did things in counterterrorism, but we don't make it a habit to lie to get the job done".
This guy killed prostitutes first, then a rich girl he picked up in a club, after following a self-confidence "how to pick up chicks" class, teached by Viper...yeah.
Garcia talking to Hotch:
"sir, does this stuff actually work? On real, breathing girls?"
"why are you asking me?"
"I abhor the whole 'chicks dig jerks' thing"
"Well, fortunately Garcia, you're one of the exceptions"
"well, be still my bespeckled heart, so are you, sir"
"thanks" and I smiled when Hotch smiled. I love how he says that 'thanks', his voice is more sweet, more human than usual.  :-)
Prentiss and Jordan study Viper in a club while Morgan and Reid give out fliers in another club, only Reid isn't doing too well. Morgan gives him advice: "take control of the conversation. When you talk, what makes you feel like an espert?
"statistics"
"no. Trust me, no. Something else"
"When I do magic"
"See, see, that's perfect. Chicks dig magic" which actually is very true, although I don't like that 'chicks'.
So Reid tries magic with the bartender girl, and yes, it is cool, I thought so too, I would have reacted the same way as her. He warns her to call him if he sees the suspect. "and if I don't see him? Can I still call you?" :lol: and Reid:"yeah, yeah, you could call me. If you... yeah" :lol: oh Reid :lol:
Then that same bartender sees the guy and saves his victim, but then he takes her. They save her, though. Good, she was a good one,
At the end, Jordan has a nice word from Hotch :-) and Reid opens up a package with a red kiss stamped on his card while on the phone with the cute bartender. :-)
 - Author Harlan Ellison wrote: the minute people fall in love, they become liars.
 - P.J. O'Rourke wrote: cleanliness becomes more important when godliness is unlikely.
ep 10 - Brothers in arms - Phoenix, Arizona. Cops are killed. Morgan says he understands the cops because he was a cop and saw cops get shot, and before that his father was a cop who got killed on duty. Cops think gangs did it, but it was some other guy, who tried to prove to be a 'real man' in a fight club, but failed, so took up a gun... yeah, in other words, a real loser. They catch him when he tries to kill Hotch! Tsk!
 - We are all brothers under the skin, and I, for one, would be willing to skin humanity to prove it. Ayn Rand
 - For he today who sheds his blood with me shall be my brother. William Shakespeare.
ep 11 - Normal - Orange County, CA. Norman (Mitch Pileggi) is a serial shooter; he's suffering from some kind of psychotic break, he's role-playing, he's breaking from reality, finally losing it after the terrible tragedy he suffered, six months ago when his youngest daughter was killed by a car while he was changing a tire. Jordan is troubled, after seeing that he killed right after her press release, and also that he had killed his family. "did I do that? Is this my fault?" thinking he did it after watching her press conference, which is true actually, only he's not her fault, she did what she had to do and because of it they caught him and stopped him, but it's tough on her. "I don't... I'm not sure I can do this job" - Rossi:"That's okay. There's nothing wrong with that" - Back at the office, JJ is waiting for them with her little child. Derek holds him and says "he is smiling at Derek Morgan". Prentiss and Garcia reply "gas", and everybody watches him with the baby, smiling, even Hotchner. A little bit, not a real happy one, of course, but JJ tells him "you're smiling". "gas" he replies, and then "we miss you" and I like the way his eyes keep going from the baby to her and vice versa.
 - Every normal man must be tempted at times to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag and begin to slit throats. H. L. Mencken
 - There's no tragedy in life like the death of a child. Things never get back to the way they were. President Dwight Eisenhower.
ep 12 - Soul mates - Black and white girls are being taken, raped and killed, and the episode starts with the team arresting a black man; the Bau was already there and the point now is to break him and find the last girl. This bastard has a partner, a soulmate, a white man, explaining why they alternate them. When the team realises about the partner, they talk to the family and the daughter Andrea suspects their neighbour and folllows him, and is taken. When her father comes to get her and the two partner have a fight, because one thinks 'he talked to the police about me' and the other thinks 'he wanted to hurt my daughter', (funny enough they were both wrong), she was really touching. The poor girl had believed in her father all this time, right up to this point when she realises the truth , hearing his own words.
Funny Rossi, when a policeman, after talking with Reid, asked him "where'd you find this kid?", and he said:"he was left in a basket on the steps of the Fbi" :lol:
 - No mortal can keep a secret. If his lips are silent, he chatters with his fingertips. Betrayal oozes out of him at every pore. Sigmund Freud
 - British historian C. Northcote Parkinson said: delay is the deadliest form of denial
ep 13 - Bloodline - The team is involved in a case when a ten years old girl goes missing after her mother and stepfather were murdered in their bed. Her father warns them she has epilepsy and they find her. Two parents teach their son to steal, abduct and murder, and they abduct a girl for him. The first girl was sick, had epilepsy, so she wasn't good for them, and now they're looking for another one. "you see one you like?" oh God. This has been going on for generations, the boy's mother was abducted when she was a little girl herself, but now she is part of that family and believes in their same traditions and helps abducting other girls.
They catch them, but there are others like them out there. It's not clear though, what they would do if they had girls, daughters. I mean, they showed that they always abduct girls for their sons whey they become ten, and this kid also has brothers, but do they all have just sons? Never daughters?
The father to Hotch, feeling really bad: "yesterday would have been the first time I'd seen her in a month and a half" and Hotch, really understanding, replies:"a collegue of mine asked me the other day how my son was enjoying the Christmas present they got for him, and I had to make up an answer because I didn't know" oh my heart, Hotch...
Jordan says JJ will be back to work three weeks earlier, and shes'll go back to counterterrorism.
 - Winston Churchill said: there is no doubt that it is around the family and the home that all the greatest virtues of human society are created, strenghthened and mantained.
 - Mario Puzo wrote: the strength of a family, like the strength of an army, is in its loyalty to each other.
ep 14 - Cold comfort - Olimpia, Washington. Girls are missing, dying, and a man says he is a psychic, he can 'see' things, and Rossi is upset by this. He has a history with working with psychic. It happened to him too, once, to think that since at the moment they had no other leads, there was no harm in listening to what a psychic said, but this brought them on a false track and they were not able to save the victim.
This unsub cuts the girls' hair, pierce their ears, then kills them, embalms them (not in this order), then he has sex with them: a necrophiliac, yeuch. This Roderick guy is more than troubled, he's totally sick; sure his past is traumatic, I admit it. rich but raised by a nanny girl because his parents were never there, so when she died suddenly he was alone with her for days.
You know, this Usher could actually be the real thing, only it's not and he can't be a  reliable source: he said he could see water, the sea, and it turns out that out of the window of the sicko there was a big commercial poster of some beer, showing a nice view of the sea and a lighthouse. He was right, but Rossi was right too. If they had gone for his words, they would have searched that house by the sea portrayed in a picture, and they would not have been in time to save her.
Rossi is right "when people are vulnerable, they'll believe a lot of things", but the psychic tells him "there are people out there that don't believe in what you do, either" well, that's a good reply, Usher...
 - And so, all the night-tide, I lay down by the side, of my darling, my darling, my life and my  bride, in the sepulchre there by the sea, in her tomb by the sounding sea. Edgar Allan Poe
 - For those who believe, no proof is necessary. For those who don't believe, no proof is possible. Stuart Chase
ep 15 - Zoe's reprise - Rossi is at a book reading and signing in Cleveland, Ohio, and he meets a girl telling him she believes there's a serial killer there, but Rossi has nothing to make him believe it true, so he goes away telling her to keep studying and 'don't stop until you find all the answers you're looking for'. "I won't" she says, then she immediately goes investigating by herself, and is murdered. He had given her his card, so police calls him. She was called Zoe Hawkes. "I just talked to her last night. I never asked her name"...
Rossi gets his team involved and together they find a connection: "he's a serial killer studying serial killers".
Rossi and Hotch talking: "it's because of what I said that she was encouraged to go there last night"
"Dave, what are you doing?"
"She came to me and I dismissed her"
"try not to personalise it" ... which is a stupid thing to say, sorry Hotch but it is.
"I was the last one she talked to before she was murdered. How is this not personal, Aaron?"
"okay, it's personal"  duh! yeah, it is!
Rossi wanted to pay for Zoe's funeral, but her mother is not pleased "I don't need or want your money. I have taken care of my daughter for 22 years and she is still my responsibility. I don't need any help from you. You didn't even know her" which is true but he felt really bad about what happened and wanted to do something, and did what every wealthy man does, but money can't fix everything.
They find the guy, believing he's strangling another girl, but she's his girlfriend! She doesn't know this, but he took her to have sex to all his murder scenes. At the end, Rossi's wondering if his books aren't doing more harm than good, and JJ tells him of when she was at her senior year in Georgetown and met him in the campus bookstore: he was promoting his second book, and she sat through his whole talk, and it was then, because of him, that she decided to follow that career.
JJ is showing pictures of Henry: "this is him wearing the customised leather jacket auntie Penelope got him" oh God :lol: she gave him a leather jacket... :lol:
 - I never teach my pupils. I only attempt to provide the conditions in which they can learn. Albert Einstein
 - Australian novelist Marie Von Ebner-Eschenbach wrote: in youth we learn, in age we understand
ep 16 - Pleasure is my business - Hotch is watching a video on his computer about his son learning to ride a bike when he receives a call. A prostitute is killing rich, important people. On the plane, they talk about how women serial killer are rare and different, they don't take trophies, there's no torture, because there's no sexual gratification when a woman kills, murder is the goal.
Dallas. This woman kills only men who walked out completely of their families. Learning that Hotch is on the case, she looks him up on youtube finding a video of the speech he made during that case of the loser killing cops, but then a new client talks to her about how they "handle the Fbi" and she thinks he's like all the others, protecting the powerful. She calls him: "for a moment, I actually thought there were still good people in the world" she tells him.
"But I've disappointed you, haven't I? Just like all the other men in your life who've walked out on their families, who deserve to be punished"
"Did you walk out on your family?"
"No. My wife left me".
"Do you have kids?"
"I have a son"
"How often do you see him?"
"I try to see him every week"
"tsk! Do you see him every week?"
"No, I don't get there as often as I want"
"I believe you, but don't compare yourself to the men I see. You are nothing like them. You're just another whore."
"How am I a whore?"
"You come when called. You do their bidding. In hotels, you take the side elevator to avoid crowds while the men who pay your salary walks across the ivory marble foyer into their cars...I won't let you cover this up" and she's crying.
They discover her name, and contact her father, so he has a meeting with her. When she meets him, he's all 'my little girl, I love you, I will protect you" and she hugs him crying, like any girl she wants to believe him badly, but then he asks for her client list, the bastard, because that's all he wanted. She doesn't kill him, but she gives him an empty phone then simply waits for Hotch to find her, to give him the real list.
"Who was it that said: You don't pay a prostitute for sex, you pay her to leave afterwards?"
"It was Dashiell Hammett"
"That doesn't make sense. The men always leave first"
She has poisoned herself, but unlike the other men in her life Hotch keeps his word and stays with her, holding her hand till the end... this was a sad episode, I kind of felt for her. Of course she had to be stopped, yes I know this...but still, I liked her a lot.
 - The prostitute is not, as feminists claim, the victim of men, but rather their conqueror, an outlaw, who controls the sexual channels between nature and culture. Camille Paglia
ep 17 - Demonology - Emily is brought into a case by her friend Johnny, telling her how their friend Matthew died. Matthew was important to her.  Rossi hears Prentiss' story: she said before she had met Matthew in Rome when she was 15. Now she explains how he helped her when she got pregnant.
Sometimes I wonder how can they find time to follow their personal cases: JJ always says she's full of cases to choose from, so why don't they? Anyway, men with drug problems or mental illnesses are considered possessed by the devil by their own families, who requested an exorcism for them. When they find the excorcist priest, he has immunity. It's impressive how well Prentiss pronounces Italian words, it's not common. It's right for her character, since she lived here for some time, having a mother ambassador, but it's not so common for American actors.
At the end they stop him from doing the same to her friend John.
Prentiss: "it's like the end of the Dead, when Gretta remembers the boy she loved when she was younger, and she says 'I think he died for me' "
Rossi: "you know James Joyce also said: 'there is no heresy or philosophy so abhorrent to the church as a human being' "
Apparently the team or the office talked to the Vatican who intervened, so the Italian government revoked his immunity, so now they are sending him back to Italy. Oh , good, thank... :-/
 - Leonardo Da Vinci said: he who does not punish evil commands it to be done.
ep 18 - Omnivore - At night, Hotch pays a visit to Tom, an old partner: ten years ago they worked together the Reaper case, then Tom closed the case without an arrest and sent Hotch away. Now, before he dies, he tells him why: he made a deal with the murderer: "if you stop hunting me I'll stop hunting them. For as long as we both shall live. Till death do us part". Tom agreed, and the killings stopped, but now he's dying. Hitch doesn't approve "we don't let them get away with it".
It was 1998, Hotch's first case as lead profiler.  (Btw, Hotch looks good without a tie, doesn't he? :-) )
Now the Boston Reaper starts killing again. Apparently the ninth victim of the reaper survived, and they think he might be in danger now, but at the end he turns out to be the reaper himself. He tried to make the same deal with Hotch, but he refuses: "I don't make deals. I'm the guy who hunts guys like you". Go Hotch, tell him! But after he hangs up the reaper kills again and Hotch feels guilty.  Rossi:"if you want to end up like Shaunessy, like Gideon, blaming yourself for everything, you go ahead. But that voice in your head, it's not your conscience, it's your ego This isn't about us, Aaron, it's about the bad guys. That's why we profile them. It's their fault. We're just guys doing a job. And when we stop doing it, someone else will. Trust me. I know." then Hotch tells him to put away the gun he had offered to give him to end it: "it's a little dramatic, don't you think ?"
"My wife always said I had a flair for the dramatic"
"Which one?"
"All of them" :-) It was a great scene, Thomas Gibson was great, with his eyes almost wet, it was intense , and Mantegna was great too.
The ep ends with Foyet escaping from prison!
 - Fate is not satisfied with inflicting one calamity. Roman author Publilius Syrus.
 - Men heap together the mistakes of their lives and create a monster they call destiny. John Hobbes.
ep 19 - House on fire - Royal, Indiana. A cinema on fire, all doors closed, 19 people killed. Not the first fire. Usually arsonists don't kill, but now a guy does He was sent away years ago, to take him away from his sister because of town's rumours.
"I want to see the good in people, I choose to see the good in people" oh, Garcia is so good.
Getting into someone's mind and trying to find the God-awful thing that happened to them that made them do the God-awful thing to somebody else has seriously impaired my ability to giggle, and it makes my brain all wonky, and I don't like it" and Hotch thanks her for her great job, tells her she helped them a lot, and that he'd never want her to change... I totally understand her when she remains open-mouth after this! A compliment like this from Hotch is something special, somehow...
 - Tennessee Williams said: we all live in a house on fire, no fire department to call, no way out.
 - I have loved to the point of madness. That which is called madness, that which to me is the only sensible way to love. Francoise Sagan . 
ep 20 - Conflicted - Guys are killed during spring break in South Padre. The team thinks it's the work of a team, a man and a woman working together, but eventually Reid realizes it might be just one guy with Dissociative Identity Disorder. His friend Julie tries to help him, but his alter personality Amanda throws her off the roof. Prentiss and Hotch stay with her while Morgan and Reid run after Adam/Amanda. Reid remembers Tobias and feels guilty.  "None of us could have noticed" - "I could have. Tobias Hankel"  He remembers how the personality of the father had killed him, but the real Tobias saved his life, so now he'd like to save Adam.
To protect Adam for the last time, Amanda takes control of him, doesn't let him come out anymore.
It ends showing Reid periodically visiting Amanda in the mental hospital where she's kept, trying to convince her to let Adam free. Now, they make it look like he's determined to keep doing this as long as it's necessary to free Adam, but I wonder, will the show talk about this again? Or it'll be one of those things they do sometimes, when they say that he'll keep doing it but then they forget about it and never talk about it ever again??
 - Light thinks it travels faster than anything, but it is wrong. No matter how fast light travels, it finds the darkness has always gotten there first, and is waiting for it. Terry Pratchett.
A quote from Terry Pratchett, when I saw this I was thrilled! I love Terry Pratchett, his genius!
 -Stephen King wrote: monsters are real, and ghosts are real too. They live inside us, and sometimes, they win.
ep 21 - A shade of gray - The case: little kids abducted and killed. Now Kyle appears to be missing. He would be the third victim. "99% of abducted children are killed in the first 24 hours" oh thanks Rossi, to remind me how such this world is.  After ten minutes they find their bastard, but they can connect him only to the first two boys, not to the third. Rollins (John Billingsley) says he didn't want to do these things, he can't help himself, like we should feel sorry for him! You know what I think? If ever in his life he had thought it was wrong to do those things, he'd have done anything on Earth to prevent it, no matter what! I'd kill myself before doing that to a child, for the love of God! Pity him, tsk, no way, loathe him, yes!
They realize that, while being guilty for the first two boys, Rollins had nothing to do with Kyle. They press Detective Lancaster with questions, until he confesses. It was a hard scene, I liked this Lancaster a lot, I knew he was lying. Good acting.
Later on, alone with Kyle's brother Danny, Prentiss realizes he "has a bad temper" and asking hi questions she learns that Danny killed him because Kyle had broken his toy. Danny's a complete sociopath, feels nothing for the people.
 - Dr Burton Grebin once said: to lose a child is to lose a piece of yourself.
 - André Maurois wrote: without a family, man, alone in the world, trembles with the cold.
ep 22 - The big wheel - A man with severe OCD murders a woman and films it, then writes "help me" and sends the video to the police. He has killed twelve women in the last ten years. He changed when two years ago he met the blind son of one of his victims; he secretly kept in touch, they became friends... Vincent gets shot when he stabs a mugger, but he takes young Stan to the Ferris Wheel at a theme park. The team rushes in, but when they come down from the wheel, he's already dead.
 - In order for the light to shine so brightly, the darkness must be present. Francis Bacon.
 - No matter how dark the moment, love and hope are always possible. George Chakiris.
ep 23 - Roadkill - Kevin has a job interview, but it's an overseas position..
Bend, Oregon. A guy kills with his car people with red cars. I always wonder why in films, in a similar situation, the victim runs straight ahead, making it easy for those in the car. Maybe it's just panic, I don't think they believed they could outrun a car...
This guy had a car accident. A red car crushed into his, leaving him paralyzed and killing his wife. A cop, Gil Bonner, thinks it might be his fault. He had an accident, well not exactly, nothing happened to him, but he thinks he caused one.
Hotch: Why didn't you stop?
Gil: It didn't seem real.
JJ: You're saying you just pretended it didn't happen?
Gil: I guess if you tell yourself something for long enough, you can make anything true.
But the truth is that Ian the murderer was driving a red car. There was no other car that night, he was the one responsible for the accident. JJ can tell Gill that he didn't kill anyone: he caused a man to drive off the road, just a bit of damage to the car, nothing more. I liked this Gil a lot, great scenes.
Kevin doesn't get the job because the position just "went away" because of a security breach: "someone hacked the project database so the whole project was put on hold" and Garcia knows the place. She hacked it :-) to know more about it. So they stay here together. :-)
 - I'm not sure about automobiles. With all their speed forward they may be a step backward in civilization . Booth Tarkington.
 - The human voice can never reach the distance that is covered by the still small voice of conscience. Mahatma Gandhi.
ep 24 - Amplification - Someone kills a whole lot of people at a park.
They find the right name and Derek goes with Reid to check his house, but while he's on the phone Reid goes in alone and gets exposed to the Anthrax. Reid rushes to close the door, locking Derek out, safe.
Reid: Hotch, I really messed up this time.
If it wasn't so tragic it'd be funny: Reid should lose his habit of going on on his own.
He then calls Garcia:
-Hey Reid
-Reid? Wow, no witty Garcia greeting for me?
-I can't be my sparkly self when you are where you are.
-Garcia, do you think you can do something for me? I know I can't call my mom without alerting everyone at her hospital.
-What do you need? - Just like Molly Hooper, same thing. No useless words, just whatever it is that he needs, she'll do it for him. That's love, but it's also absolute trust.
-I need you to record a message for her in case anything happens to me.
Awwww.
He keeps investigating in there, and as soon as possible he's rushed to the hospital in a bad shape, the aphasia-fase almost starting.
JJ was worried sick about his son, because she couldn't warn them. She calls her family when it's all over, and Hotch calls to talk to his son. :-)
Derek is at the hospital when Reid wakes up.
 - It will become fine dust over all the land of Egypt and will become boils breaking out with sores on man and beast through all the land of Egypt. Exodus 9:9.
 - Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Helen Keller.
ep 25 - To hell... and back - Detroit, Michigan. A man crosses the border to Canada but then deliberately crashes into it and confesses he's killed ten people and wants them to call the Fbi. He's an ex-soldier, even received a Purple Heart.
They meet with Jeff Bedwell, trained by Dave. :-) Hotch interrogates him: he's not a killer, he wanted to make sure those deaths were investigated seriously. He had gone to Detroit police three times already, but they didn't care. "people disappear. That's how life on the streets works"
He kept looking for his sister every night and noticed many people missing. He also didn't want his mother to know about the investigation. "I don't want her living off hope. Bad news stop us for a while, but then you move on. Hope is paralyzing."
I agree on this. They always say hope is better, but it's so very important when it's real, not just an illusion.
A guy abducts people pretending to be a drug dealer, and then smuggles them to Canada. The team arrives to his name, but he's paralyzed .
 - Flannery O'Connor said: If there were no hell, we would be like the animals. No hell, no dignity. 
ep 26 - This is the second part of the last episode.
At that man's farm, they find lots of shoes, belonging to much much more than ten victims. They were 89!
The bodies were fed to the pigs. Yeuch, I don't like this double episode. Somehow, it seems to me worse than anyone else.
Mason Turner is quadriplegic, paralyzed from the neck down. There's another man who has abducted another girl, but they don't know about him. Hotch calls Garcia down there. Mason tries to blame it on his brother Lucas, but Garcia discovers on his computer that he was doing experiments, trying to fix himself. I really don't like this double episode, for some reason, though I kinda like that Kelly talking to Lucas. At the end the brothers both die, Mason shot by our grieving ex-soldier, Lucas by policemen.
"Sometimes there are no words, no clever quotes to neatly sum up what's happened that day. Sometimes you do everything right, everything exactly right and still you feel like you've failed. Did it need to end that way? Could something have been done to prevent the tragedy in the first place?" Long thought by Hotch.
Back home Hotch finds a man inside, who points a gun at him : "you should have made the deal" then the screen goes black and we hear a shot. He's the Boston Reaper. The situation is tragic but I'm not really worried for Hotch, because he sure can't die, this show wouldn't be the same without him.

End of season 4.